I Died Nightly.

I had a vivid memory of this experience the other night and I wanted to record it here before I lose it again.

For the full cinematic experience of this thread, you should probably click on THIS link. It leads to the website of the composer of the original score of the show that I am describing. His name is Michael Rasbury and I heard his music, six nights a week, for three months, three summers in a row. Play Track #2 in a separate window whilst you're reading this post. It's nice and Indiany.



In the summers of 1996, 1997 and 2000, I was an actor in an outdoor drama in Harrodsburg, Ky. The show was called "The Legend of Daniel Boone" and it was your typical outdoor drama. The hero, Daniel Boone, was a rugged, but charming man. He and his wife, Rebecca set out to start a new life for themselves in the frontier of Kentucky. There's lots of poetry about how beautiful Kentucky is. I always thought that it was included in the script to sell the state to the poor bastards who were stuck living there. At the end of Act 1, Boone's son, Jamie is killed by indians and his daughter is kidnapped. With his intrepid friends, he hunts down the indians and has a man to man fight with the baddest indian of all, Plukehmenotee. "Pluggy" is killed and this act forces the chief Blackfish to declare war on the white man.

In act 2, it opens with a wedding for Daniel's daughter and there is dancing and merriment for one and all. Then a messenger brings word that the indians are on the warpath. Daniel Boone goes to make peace with the indians and is captured. He lives with them for months and is actually adopted by the indians. It's clear that he and Blackfish are intellectual equals and that they respect each other. When Boone learns that Blackfish feels that he has no option but to attach the whites "when the moon is full", Boone escapes. He runs back to his friends and family at Fort Boonesboro and raises the alarm. They don't have much time before the indians arrive to lay siege to the fort.

Sure enough, in the very next scene, Blackfish arrives with his indian army. (We used to make the indian army look larger by hiding torches in the woods of the stage, behind the trees and lighting them. It always looked like there were hundreds of indians. There weren't. There were about ten of them. But there were dozens and dozens of unmanned torches burning offstage.) Blackfish goes to make peace with Boone and a bigoted frontiersman panics and shoots Blackfish, killing him dead. There is a moment of shock and then the Evil Colonel Mackenzie of the British army (and indian liaison) launches the attack and there's a devastating assault on the fort. Spears are thrown. George Rogers Clark and Mackenzie duel with swords. There are hundreds of shots fired on both sides. One indian scales the parapet wall and fights the settlers there. At the end of the battle there's an impressive 5 minute torch run, where the indians throw dozens of metal, flaming torches over the parapet wall, setting one of the fort buildings on fire. When that fire wall went alight in every show, it was something to behold. The fires shot up nearly two stories.

Eventually, the settlers come out and make their last stand at the fort doors. My character stands across the stage from them, waving his sword, rallying the troops, the remaining indians join him, with their torches and spears. One final assault is launched and the settlers mow them down with a barrage of fire from their flintlocks. The mortally wounded indians crawl and scurry through the trees to go die offstage. My character, Mackenzie, lies dead, a few feet from the parapet walls.

Daniel Boone comes down to survey the damage. When his back is turned, Mackenzie, holding his guts in, stands behind him and raises his sword to cut down the unsuspecting Boone. The Music swells. The audience gasps. And then a lucky shot from Daniel Boone's best friend, Mike, shoots Mackenzie in the back of the head and the villain doubles over backwards, sprawled out in a dead rictus onstage.

And then the dialogue begins...

Five pages of it.

With Boone furiously berating the man who started it all.
He defends himself and then calls Boone a traitor for living with the indians.
George Rogers Clarke steps in and calms things down. He asks Boone what happened.
Boone explains, his voice trembling because of his very real sorrow at the death of Blackfish.
George Rogers Clarke assures him that he understands and that when he gets back to Harrodsburg, he will set things right.
The settlers go back into the fort to tend to the dead and wounded.
Boone, alone, goes down to the body of Blackfish. He calls out to the indians he knows are there. He tells them that they can come claim the body of their fallen chief. That they won't be harmed.
An indian brave appears at the tree line.
Then another.
Then another.
Finally, there are 6 of them and in the distance we see their women, grieving over the dead chief.
Boone goes back to the fort gate and looks back to see the indians raise their chief over their heads and they carry him high, at arms length over them, singing the lonely wolf chant. An actual indian mourning song that all of the indians must learn.

When they get him offstage, Boone goes back into the fort, the narrator appears up in the blockhouse and the lights go to blackout and I can finally scamper off into the shadows, myself, and get backstage, where I can spit the sand out of my mouth, reclaim the costume parts that the indians have cleared for me and my sword back from George Rogers Clark. I know that I have two more scenes before the final closing tableau and then bows and then the onstage Meet & Greet that ends each performance. I know from experience that the two questions I will get asked is "Can I see your sword?" and "Are you really British?" That's just how it goes...

But before all of that happens, and after I was shot dead and during that mountain of dialogue, I had a good long time to just lie there in the sand, slightly upstage and look up at the stars.

There was a great big, wide-open space between the trees and I could see the stars so clearly up there. It was dark in our theater, in the moments after the battle. And the town of Harrodsburg, KY was small enough that it didn't really present much in the way of ambient light. So there was nothing except maybe cloud cover to keep me from looking at the stars.



I guess in the first few weeks of my first summer of doing the show, I thought about the fight sequence that I'd just had. Whether my sword fight was clean and clear. Whether I'd timed my entrance right. Or how my final death looked. After a time though, the pattern of getting shot and laying there in the sand for so long became an experience all to itself. I would look up at the stars and admire how bright they were. How far away they must be. How long before I was born had they been burning? And how long after me would they continue to burn?

I would feel very, very small, laying there in the sand. And yet, I would feel very, very connected to something much larger than me. Connected to the universe.

And then the blackout would happen and I would scurry through the sally port gate and someone would hand me my hat and someone else would hand me my sword and the night would go on with it's normal pace... but for a few minutes every night, I was alone, onstage, dying in the sand. A bit character in someone else's play, laying there and expanding his gaze upwards and extending his consciousness into the universe, itself. And those moments would feel very, very vivid to me. I can remember that experience even now. Seven years later.

In all fairness, I should also mention that I did a lot of drugs in those summers and explored a carnival of hallucinogens. I was never high onstage (are you kidding? One run in the wrong direction and someone would shoot you with a flintlock rifle!), but my consciousness was being expanded for me, that summer. And those nightly death scenes were a part of it all...

Cheers,
Mr.B


That's me. As Colonel Mackenzie. In the Legend of Daniel Boone. In 2000.
The MuttonChops were real.
Photo credit has got to go to the Inimitable Mr. John Kibler.